to create imagery and maps for PowerPoint, Word, and other presentation tools.

as a data discovery, organization, and distribution tool for research projects.

to enrich discussion of an issue that arises spontaneously during an informal classroom discussion.

Google Earth offers the means to display geographic data from a wide variety of sources together in a geospatial context. This data includes imagery for the entire globe at varying resolutions that contains a great deal of interpretable visual information. Students can use it to find their homes, schools, and other locations that are familiar to them. They can make inferences by comparing familiar places to other locations. In addition, students can learn about the world through rich layers of mappable data offered by Google's server and a great deal of third-party content. They can also create and display their own data.

Declan DePaor at Old Dominion University is having students create a collection of Google Earth teaching materials entitled Google Earth Science. This set of materials includes KMZ files that represented various types of tectonic plate boundaries, mountain belts, volcanoes, and other geological features as cross sections, and includes a profile of the atmosphere and Earth's magnetic field. Cutaways also represent the three-dimensional structure of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Earth, and our moon.

For the Google Earth plugin running in a browser, Declan De Paor, Steve Wild, Mladen Dordevic, Steve Whitmeyer, Nick Pence, and Liz Weisbrot, developed a set of Google Earth Geoscience Labs and Exercises. These focus on geologic landforms, the geology of Virginia, glacial geology, mid-Atlantic tectonics in Iceland, tectonics of Tonga, and other topics.

Students in Dr. Christine Erlien's writing course, The View from Above: Google Earth's Impact, at Duke University, created a blog in order to share their knowledge of how Google Earth can, and is, impacting education. Their work can be found at Teaching (and Learning) with Google Earth.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks offers a course Geog493: Exploring the Virtual Earth that teaches students how to use Google Earth, and offers introductory KML exercises.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, the Food Mapping project is helping students understand how their meals relate to the Earth system. They can trace the ingredients for several types of meals back to their sources.

In his post to the Google Earth Community Forums, Antarctica with ANDRILL, Ken Mankoff is making data from Antarctica available for educational use in Google Earth.

A group of educators in New York State have developed New York Landscape Regions in Google Earth. This consists of a collection of datasets containing placemarks and overlays of USGS topographic maps for sites througout the state, organized by physiographic region. The collection is primarily designed for high school Earth science classes, but can also be useful for introductory college geoscience courses. The project can serve as a model for datasets for other states.

Real World Math has lesson plans for pre-college classes that use Google Earth to teach mathematics.

Google Earth can support field studies by importing GPS data that has been saved in GPX format. GPS Tracks are represented as paths in Google Earth, and waypoints become placemarks.

Google Earth data is in the form of KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which is an XML-based text format that can be edited directly in a text editor. Data created in Google Earth can be saved in KML format or in a zipped format known as KMZ. Because KML is a text format, spreadsheets can be used to create KML from data in tabular format provided that it contains latitude and longitude information in a systematic manner. Learning to edit or create KML directly outside Google Earth allows more flexibility than being restricted to the Google Earth user interface to create the data. To learn more about KML, see KML Documentation Introduction.

When exploring places in Google Earth, students should make it a standard practice to look for points in the layers that in that location. They should learn to look for relationships between information from varied subject areas in order to develop an interdisciplinary thinking perspective.

Prior to conducting a school field trip for any purpose, educators should add value to the experience by enriching the students' geographic perspective of the landscape they are about to traverse. The students should be given an opportunity to explore the route on Google Earth in order to develop a conceptual geographic context for the landscape that they are about to travel. They should be encouraged to investigate layers that contain information about places along the route.

Google Sketchup is a companion program to Google Earth, also available for free download, for creating, modifying and sharing 3D models of buildings, bridges, and other structures. The models can be added as data for display in a geographic context in Google Earth's 3D Viewer.

Formative assessment is an essential part of the educational process. In the computer laboratory, the instructor can observe the students directly as they engage in activities. Discussions during and after the activities provide constant feedback to the instructor, and student responses can reveal whether the students are learning what is intended. During the activities the discussion can be modified toward mitigating any problems in understanding that are discovered during the discussion. If any of the difficulties in achieving the learning goals are caused by shortcomings of the instructional materials, they can should be modified to address these problems for the benefit of future classes. Instructors who use these activities in their classes should be provided with a means of communicating with each other, so that they can use each other's experiences with their classes to upgrade the teaching materials. This information should also be communicated to the groups who host the materials on the web or otherwise disseminate it.

Students should be expected to hand in the results of their work either electronically or in hard copy form. If the activity involved creating any KMZ files, they should be submitted electronically so they can be viewed in Google Earth. This can also enable the instructor to determine whether the learning goals have been met.

The Digital Library for Earth System Education provides an Evaluation & assessment help for educators page "to help educators and evaluation professionals make better use of evaluation in Earth system science education".

For K-12 educators, the National Science Teachers Association has posted a review of the book Science Formative Assessment by Page Keeley, published by Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, California in 2008.

Google Earth as a Research Tool

In addition to its value for classroom education, Google Earth is an effective tool for making data available for research purposes. For example, the United States Geological Survey distributes stream gage data in KML format on the Google Earth Streamflow KML Files page of its WaterWatch site. The Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy makes a favorability map and temperature gradient data available for viewing in Google Earth at the bottom of its GIS Regional Spatial Data Download page.

USGS Stream Gage data for Kauai

The 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco included four sessions on Using Geobrowsers for Science. Presentation topics included the following:

Visualizing Large Datasets with LAS and Google Earth

Historical Natural Hazards Data in Google Earth

How to Display Hazards and other Scientific Data Using Google Maps

Climate Change in Google Earth

Utilizing Geobrowsers to Convey Critical Information during a Natural Disaster

National Geophysical Data Center - This site offers data and imagery, including a natural hazards KML file with data on earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunami events.

Google maintains a KML Gallery with a wide variety of data on world oil consumption, a geologic atlas of the United States, rising sea level, population density, travel information, economics and other topics.

GPS Visualizer offers online tools for preparing GPS data for use in Google Maps and Google Earth. The tools can create maps with a choice of a variety of backgrounds, including Landsat imagery, topography, and political boundaries.

Ogle Earth is a blog with links to data and information about Google Earth and other virtual globes.

The Google Earth Blog often features links to sites where Google Earth data can be found, and has articles on many Google Earth topics.

Keeping in Touch with Google Earth Developments

Google Earth is periodically updated to incorporate new functionality, and people are continually developing new data and finding new uses for Google Earth. The following sites are good sources of information about these developments, and it is a good idea to visit them regularly.

The Google Earth Community Forums

The Google Earth Community Forums are online discussions about Google Earth and many Earth-related topics. They are intended for sharing information about places, events, and techniques, and for exchanging data. You can join the Google Earth Community as a new user by specifying a login name, password, and other information in an online form. Thereafter, you can initiate discussion threads or reply to posts in existing threads. Before submitting your first post, become familiar with existing ones, including the announcements and "sticky threads" marked by a push pin at the top of the index for each forum. Avoid submitting posts that essentially provide information that has already been posted.

Posts to the Google Earth Community Forums can have a KMZ, KML or zip file attached. The KMZ and KML files are intended to be opened in Google Earth or Google Maps, and the zip files can be offered as archives that contain other file types, such as Word, PowerPoint and image files.

In order to include images in the body of a post to the Forums, you must upload the images to a server such as Flickr or ImageShack and reference them from there. In most cases, image hosting services request or require that images embedded in forum posts or in pages on other servers function as links back to the host. In the case of Flickr, embedded photographs need to specifically link to their photo pages.

The Google Earth Blog by Frank Taylor offers Google Earth news, commentary, and tips. The news often consists of notifications of imagery updates, for example. Frank is currently sailing around the world and using Google Earth to guide and document his trip.

Stefan Geens offers the Ogle Earth blog, which provides news about virtual globes, with a primary focus on Google Earth.

Bjørn Sandvik's Thematic Mapping Blog offers news, data, and tools concerning Google Earth and the Google Earth API. The site also discusses and provides examples of animations and techniques for representing data in Google Earth that are generally associated with GIS.

This infant mortality map includes a control panel and was developed using the Google Earth API. The map is available on the Thematic Mapping Blog.

Juicy Geography, by Noel Jenkins, is a collection of ideas, lessons and resources for teaching geography

The Using Google Earth blog provides advice on exploring the world effectively in Google Earth.

Google Earth Design is a blog that offers advice on how to use Google Earth, tips on map design, and commentary on the design of Google Earth KMZ data that is available on the web.

An effective means of keeping up with Google Earth developments is to attend or consult the literature or web content for meetings. Regularly occurring events that focus on geobrowsers are offered at meetings of the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union.

Google allows non-commercial personal use of the images created from Google Earth, provided that copyrights and attributions are preserved. Works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation. This means that those images can be freely modified, redistributed and used for commercial purposes.

News, Events, Workshops and Webinars from Teach the Earth

Learn More »

Is your department overhauling its curriculum? Have new faculty in your department? Is your department involved in strategic planning? Facing changing enrollment or striving to increase diversity? Want to increase the emphasis on teaching science in the context of societal issues?

InTeGrate & NAGT invite you to improve learning about the Earth in your courses, programs, & departments through our Traveling Workshops Program (TWP). Application deadlines are 1/31 and 3/15.

Teaching Landform Evolution with WILSIM-GCThe WILSIM project has developed a collection of teaching activities that explore the evolution of the Grand Canyon, and how the shape of the canyon is affected by a variety of physical factors, via the landscape simulation model WILSIM-GC. These activities range from step-by-step guided inquiry activities through open-ended exploration of the interactions of model parameters.

NAGT Events at AGU 2016NAGT is pleased to outline a variety of geoscience education sessions available at the Fall 2016 AGU Meeting in San Francisco next month. Stop by the NAGT booth (#308) for the most up-to-date information on upcoming workshops, educational resources, and teaching activities.

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Glenn Richard, SUNY at Stony Brook

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